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A friend posted this article about the purpose of the Bechdel test (see the article if you don’t know what that is) and how it’s not all about ‘passing’ the test. In a nutshell, the author sums it up like this:

It’s not that the audience doesn’t want to hear what “women” characters have to say, as one film pro told me… It’s that we don’t want to hear what’s said by irrelevant, underdeveloped characters who have nothing to do with the plot.

When you start thinking about movies you’ve seen recently, you might be shocked at how few pass the test – even those that have caught your heart for their other good qualities (including stereotype breaking).

Off the top of my head, here’s some movies I’ve watched in the past few months, and whether they passed: (I’m leaving out some really obvious ones, like Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction.)

Inception – fail

Hero – fail

Toy Story 3 – fail (!?)

Love Actually – fail (another ?!)

Shrek Forever After – pretty sure it fails

The Social Network – fail

Chico & Rita – fail

Despicable Me – unless you consider the orphanage lady’s commands or a few joking lines exchanged between the 3 girls ‘conversation’, fail

Avatar – pretty sure this fails, even though I loved the woman scientist and the kick-ass helicopter pilot

How to Train Your Dragon – fails, even though it reverses gender stereotypes (a strong, competitive but cold-hearted female is taught how to care by a weak, shy male with a big heart who doesn’t want to kill and connects with animals?? WHAT!?) and does a good portrayal of disability

Winter’s Bone – probably a technical fail, but I’d be willing to argue its case, as the whole story revolves around a missing father, even though he is never actually IN the film. So just about every conversation is, indeed, about him. However, the main character is a woman and so are many of the supporting characters. In fact, it has some really interesting portrayals of women in this society and how they interact.

However, what happens when you take it to literature? Even with all Larsson does for strong female characters in his Millennium Trilogy (especially in the third book), it is probably a fail. Though the characters are diverse and independent, they’re also islands, connected only by Bloomkvist. When they interact, it is about Bloomkvist.

People are often very invested in creationism*. For most, it is a moral imperative – the Bible says it is so, and if that part of the Bible is wrong, then what’s stopping the whole thing from being wrong? Or, it’s a matter of fear – not wanting to dare tread on the toes of the insitution they’ve been raised in. A minority don’t believe evolution because they’re ignorant of science.

For me, the most frustrating thing about most creationist arguments is that they’re just plain untrue. Half of them betray a complete misunderstanding of the Theory of Evolution. The rest of them betray a complete lack of a science education or basic research. Or they’re off-topic. One that continually drives me bat-shit-insane is “Vestigal organs, like humans losing their tail, are proof that evolution is false, because evolution is about advancing and gaining function, not losing it!”

If you don’t understand why this argument is wrong, then the rest of this post is probably too advanced for you. You should spend the time reading basic evolutionary theory instead, then come back.

What most creationists don’t realise (I assume…) is that the claims they gather so eagerly off the internet (seriously?) are so very untrue. Very few sites cite sources; fewer sites cite scientific research as sources. Creationists, I can again only assume, seem to think that these ideas they’re spreading around are completely new and untested. Perhaps believing that scientists wouldn’t deign to look into matters like religion, or more likely, that scientists are too scared to test these ideas in case they were proven correct! (*Gasp*) But, as so often, creationists are wrong again. While perhaps few of the arguments have been directly tested, science itself is advanced enough that most of these crazy new ideas are disproven quite easily.

Unfortunately (but understandably), in order to come up with reasons why these creationist arguments are false usually requires at least a decent understand of biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and argumentative fallacies and at most a good poke around in the scientific literature. Otherwise, you’re unlikely to even know where to start looking, never mind where to find the answer.

Luckily, these days we have the Internet. And these days we have someone intelligent enough to realise that only having scientists and professors, scattered over many fields, well-enough equipt to refute and give proof that these arguments are false is not a good enough defense against hoards of list-waving people screaming out reasons why evolution can’t exist that they don’t even understand, never mind came up with. At least, not a good enough defense if the common person can’t access a scientist or professor for the truth when confronted with these reasons. And these days, we’re lucky enough to have someone kind enough to spend the time to make a website of happy!!!

This website is a compiled list of pretty much every creationist argument ever made, and perhaps every personal question you’ve ever pondered about evolution. And every argument has a refutement – and every refutement has citations! Hooray! It has answers to the simpler arguments we’ve all probably come across, like:

Ockham’s Razor says’s the simplest explanation is prefferable, and creationism is simpler [answer]

The eye cannot have evolved gradually – that means at some point there would have been ‘half an eye’ and that would be useless! [answer]

And the more complicated ones**:

Does chirality make the chance of simple chemicals/structures forming too small? [answer]

If DNA is replicated by proteins, but proteins are formed by DNA, how could one form without the other already being present? [answer]

So go, browse around. Have a look for yourself. There is no real science behind creationism. It’s the sad truth. If you want to disreguard science, that’s your personal choice, but please understand there’s no more reason for doing so than your own personal convictions. And please understand that your own personal convictions do not make science into a ‘pick and choose’ buffet line – evolution is proven far well enough to be taught everywhere, just like all the other hard sciences, so whether it’s controversial or not, we must include it, or degrade our own scientific system.

To quote:

“Evolution matters because science matters, and too many people (including some presidents) are willing to believe that science is something you can pick and choose from, with “good” science being anything that supports your own views and “bad” science being anything that doesn’t. …Too many people can’t accept that although scientists are not perfect, and do make mistakes (sometimes whoppers), science isn’t something you can pick through like a buffet, accepting only what is to your “taste” and designating the rest inedible. If people feel free to reject the science of evolution, they feel free to reject any science on no better grounds ” [source]

* For the purpose of this post, I’m clumping ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’ together, because if you strip away the BS and politics, they are the same thing. Yes, really. To quote from the site referenced above, “A solution to a problem must address the parameters of the problem, or it is just irrelevant hand waving. Any theory about design must somehow address the agent and purpose, or it is not really about design.” [link] So you can argue your heart out that intelligent design isn’t about God, but it’s pretty obviously some kind of deism. I chose to use ‘creationism’ because it’s shorter.

** These arguments actually deal with the origin of life, which can be argued seperately from evolution. (Yes! It can! I could believe God threw a bunch of one-celled bacteria into the ocean and then it evolved into everything we have today.)

Hello again!Well, this is a little long, but I’d definitely like to hear what’s to be said about it.

So there’s this thing in your genome. Well, maybe not yours, but plenty of people’s. It’s called the PMP-22 gene. I don’t know what it does. It’s not really important until later. What is important is what’s in front of it. A region called CMT1A repeat. Hey, guess what’s it’s called a repeat! Cuz there’s two of them! One in front of PMP-22, one behind it! Here, let me draw a picture:

DNA: —-Proximal CMT1A repeat——–PMP-22——–Distal CMT1A repeat—–

This might seem really happy, huh? Well, it’s not. Because as you might remember from whenever you last took biology, our chromosomes do this crazy thing called crossing over. That’s during meiosis, which you might remember, is how you form gametes (eggs or sperm, depending), since they only have 1/2 the DNA of other human cells (which is why it takes two to make offspring!).

So, during crossing-over, homologous chromosomes (ex: both of your number 17 chromosomes, one from your mom, one from your dad) line up next to each other like buddies, and then they do this crazy thing where they both break a section of their DNA off, and swap sections with the other chromosome! Obviously, they it’s important that both chromosomes break at the exact same place, otherwise you could end up missing some genes! Usually this goes down just fine, since the broken piece wouldn’t reattach well if it didn’t ‘match’ the other chromosome’s broken end.

However, if you’re one of those unlucky ones who have the two CMT1A repeats, this is a problem! Because your body does not know which one is distal and which one is proximal! So chromosome 17 #1 might break at the distal location, and chromosome 17 #2 might break at the proximal location…. oh no!

Now chromosome 17 #1 has two copies of PMP-22, and chromosome 17 #2 has NO copies of PMP-22!!!

Now while the CMT1A itself is just a repeat, not a gene, it has no function. It doesn’t really matter if you have it or not, the PMP-22 is definitely a gene, and it is definitely important.

If you end up with two copies of PMP-22, you get Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease 1A. If you end up with ZERO PMP-22, you get neuropathy and palsies. Not fun!

So why do we have this repeat? Who put it here!?!? Well, it’s probably the old remnants of a ‘jumping gene’ – they copy themselves and reinsert themselves. They’re very random, though, so it’s very, very rare that they insert themselves into the exact same place in two different occurrences.

So why did God give us jumping genes? They’re kind of handy in evolution, but we all know God doesn’t believe in that, so why? They’re pretty dangerous – they can insert themselves right into the middle of a gene, rendering it useless! Dangerous!

Someone told me once that it was punishment for our sin. Ah, I see. Well, that’s a good Biblically correct answer. I know if someone I knew ate an apple when I told them not to I’d totally curse their children with genetic defects.

But wait, so, you’re saying that we have this repeat-crossing-over-problem with CMT1A because of our sins?

Well, I suggest you start preaching to chimpanzees and bonobos then, because they have the exact same defect.

“Other incident-specific factors such as fear of reprisal may influence victim reporting. (Skip one sentence.)Fear of reprisal, or retaliation for reporting a crime, influences some reporting practices. Some crimes (particularly violent crime) are not reported out of a victim’s fear of reprisal. The reporting of domestic violence incidents is sometimes influenced by the victim’s economic dependence on the offender and fear of reprisal. (Skip one sentence.) Kidd and Chayet argue that the nonreporting of crime is the result of a combination of factors acting together, or alone, including victim fear of reprisal…”

Seriously? Was there no better way to word this?Hey executive editor Frank Mortimer (no joke) – you fail.

As always, I continue to argue against creationism and show the overwhelming evidence that supports evolution. I am always looking around for new evidence and new examples – an ever-present lens I view the world through (which, to me, makes it so much more amazing through my eyes). I had an interesting thought last night that I thought should definitely be shared.

If evolution is false, then why do animals have mating rituals?

As a note, I have decided that the argument ‘because God wanted it that way’ just does not cut it when having a scientific discussion. It is forever deemed by me to be a non-answer, about a relevant as saying ‘I like tacos’. Think of all the hundreds of things we’ve deemed unexplainable in the past – rainbows, conception, whether the earth is the center of the universe, chemical reactions, gravity – that we explained away with ‘it is the will of God (or Allah, or whatever)’ that we now can explain with science and well-known scientific laws and facts. To believe that we’ve suddenly and mysteriously hit a ceiling where God’s workings are so mysterious we will never be able to see the forces working in the background is to bury one’s head in the sand in the face of reality. If you’re going to have a scientific argument, you’ve got to have some science in there – as many creationist arguments do, or attempt, at least.

Also, it makes God seem like a whiny three-year-old – ‘because I WANT IT’. And I don’t like to think of God like a three-year-old.

So why, then, do animals have mating rituals? Many mating rituals are dangerous – deer, rams, and others clash antlers/horns that can result in serious physical damage. Lions, sea lions, and some monkeys fight each other directly, causing injury and even death. Those that are not directly dangerous consume time and resources – peacocks make themselves a slow and flashy target for predators, birds waste time having elaborate displays and preparing collections of objects or nests when they could be gathering food, walruses stand for hours on beaches making a noisy display to attract females.

Certainly a better option would be to just mate with whoever is the closest member of the opposite sex, then return to normal life. After all, if evolution is false, it doesn’t really matter who you mate with – your species is safe, no matter who mates with whom. It will remain at exactly the same fitness level and will not become stronger or weaker. So with such security, why waste such resources??

I could only really think of two arguments.1. Females like to pick the best mate.Well, yea. But why do they like to do this? To ensure fitness of their offspring. Fitness only matters if evolution is true.

2. Males want to have lots of children by mating with lots of females (fighting off other males).Well yea, but why do they want to have lots of children? These aren’t humans – they don’t actually love their kids – in most species, they won’t even help raise them. In many species, they’ll actually try and kill them if they run into them! So why would they want to have lots of kids? Oh right, to pass on genes. But that only matters if evolution is true.

So apart from the argument that God really loves watching lions, monkeys, and sea lions mauling each other to death on a seasonal basis (which, from reading the Bible, isn’t too hard to believe, actually…), I feel that mating rituals are a pretty good example that there’s obviously some reason why picking a good mate is worth the effort expended and risk induced. That reason is evolution.

Change in frequency of alleles in a population. Fitness.

Please do let me know if you have any other arguments, as I like to test all my theories and ideas to the limit to make sure they stand up. Otherwise, perhaps I must reconsider my stance.

Thankfully, most of the people I know accept that microevolution* is present in the world all around us. (I’m not really sure how people who don’t believe in microevolution explain drug-resistant bacteria and etc – perhaps witchcraft? I’ve never had the pleasure of discussing evolution with such a person.)

However, they still are not convinced about macroevolution. It can be hard for someone versed in evolution/biology to understand why someone could accept one and not the other, as this quote reflects:

Saying you believe in microevolution, but not macroevolution, is like saying you believe atoms exist but that you don’t believe you’re made out of them simply because you don’t see how something so small can be a part of something so much larger. - (Credit to Patrick Hunter, in an evolution group on Facebook)

While the quote is humorous, and pretty true in my opinion, I believe there are two main reasons for why people balk at macroevolution:

1. Understanding ‘Species’ – There is a huge amount of controversy in the defining of what makes a ‘species,’ and how to differentiate species. Most people tend to take the species rules commonly used that they know at face value, without really questioning how obviously incomplete they are. We have classified animals as different species based on tiny differences in colouration, shape, or size, even when they can produce viable and fertile offspring. Yet they’re on different sides of a mountain, and don’t meet, and so don’t breed in nature, so we call them different species. Well, hey, before the Portuguese discovered Australia, Europeans certainly looked different from aborigines, and certainly didn’t interbreed. Different species? Of course we can’t say that, since it’s not politically correct – but it’s a good example of where our species rules have gotten us. Not to say that they aren’t damn good rules – it’s just that it’s hard to draw a line where there almost isn’t one (hint hint). Species are in the eyes of humans ONLY. So, forgetting this, people tend to think of macroevolution in the largest possible terms – amoeba to fish, or multi-celled creature to man. When, really, if you can accept that a few changes in size, colour, and shape can stop some specimens from back-breeding with those who don’t have the changes, you have the foundation of macroevolution. Now it’s not far to see the mutations that accumulated to differentiate a King penguin from a Galapagos penguin. And from there, it’s not hard to see how penguins differentiated from sea-going (swimming) birds, and sea-going birds from land-going birds. Follow that on up, and you’re well on your way.

2. People Don’t Understand Genetics – Many people tell me they can’t accept macroevolution because ‘it just doesn’t make sense to me.’ To really understand evolution, one must understand genes. And mutation. And alleles. And frequency of alleles. And ‘fitness.’ And ‘relative fitness.’ And change in frequency of alleles. And natural selection. And heritability. Obviously, that’s a lot to ask, and a lot to learn, especially if your biology understanding is basic. Once you can get a picture of all of this in your head, evolution clears up quite a bit – better understanding the behaviour of genes alone (never mind really understanding what ‘fitness’ means) can make a huge difference in someone’s comprehension level of evolution. But part of me wants to say that this isn’t really an excuse. Can we/should we believe what we don’t fully understand? In an ideal world the answer is no. But hey, this is reality. We believe things we don’t understand all the time. I don’t fully understand why really big things attract other things (gravity), but I believe it’s true – and I doubt anyone’s going to call me gullible for doing so. On the other hand, I don’t want to tell people to just ‘trust’ what I say when I tell them that evolution is real because I’m a biologist and I understand it. But, back to the other side, can ignorance really be claimed as a reason not to believe something? ‘I don’t understand it thus it can’t be true?’ If I really questioned the validity of gravity, I’d go out and try and find out more. I don’t think it’s asking too much for those who don’t believe in evolution to go learn some basic information so that they can better understand what ‘doesn’t make sense to them.’

I guess I do like the quote at the top more than I admitted at first. It’s true – just because you yourself can’t see how something fits in to the big picture doesn’t mean it isn’t the truth anyway. Even if it’s incredibly hard to picture (can you truly wrap your mind around the fact you’re made of itty-bitty tiny atoms whose properties are nothing like you?), it far from means it’s impossible.

So go out there, guys, and Viva la Evolution!

*I know these terms (microevolution/macroevolution) have some controversy about what they *exactly* mean, especially in the argument’s context, but whatever.

I’m tired and I don’t have the time or energy to write a long post, but I wanted to write something before it slipped my mind.

It’s occurred to me that one of the main obstacles in this world is the unwillingness of grownups/parents to accept their child will, someday, be a sexual being, just like most of the rest of us end up being. The problem is, of course, all the more pronounced with little girls. Now before you get all ‘OMG PEDOPHILE’ on my ass, let me direct you to the article that re-sparked this thought: My Daughter Has a Hand Mirror. Basically it’s an article laughing at some conservative blogger freaking out because a book for young people on sexuality seems to endorse young girls looking at their genitals with a mirror.

It’s rather befuddling. Why would anyone be opposed to this? Honestly? I guess people believe that discovery of sexual organs leads to interest in sex? People seems to be so obsessed with this ‘violation of innocence’. Well, here’s a newsflash – your daughter figuring out where her clitoris is isn’t going to be violating any innocence. Most likely she’s going to think nothing of it and go about her little life just like normal. Why this belief that she’s suddenly (apparently) going to become some different person? Why this idea that knowing about sex puts this huge burden on someone? I mean, come on, when you found out about sex, how deeply did you fall into depression? How did you mourn the passing of your childhood? I don’t remember a time I didn’t know what sex was, and I never remember it being distressing, and certainly it didn’t make me grow up any faster. Hell, I lived in my own imaginary world for probably way too long. (I might even stretch to add here that if learning about sex is overwhelmingly distressing, whatever they’ve just been taught is probably an overall distressing version of what sex is that would even cause me distress.)

Of course sex is the realm of adults, and of course we don’t want children involved in sexual acts with other people. But unless your kid has other issues, your daughter at age 8 isn’t interested in sex, at all! Except for maybe that shy curiosity, like I had, but hey, if it was in my mom’s home medical guide, I wanted to understand it inside-out. Telling them about sex, letting them learn about their own sexual organs, even them learning how to pleasure themselves sexually (as long as it doesn’t get out of hand/become a dependency/not in public, etc) – none of this is going to ruin their innocence, or change who they are. In fact, my best bet is that it will teach them to be more comfortable with their bodies, better love the person they are, and be better prepared for sexual experiences later in life (with a strong foundation of knowing themselves as sexual being before some man-boy comes and makes them one before their own self-realization).

Bottom line is this: The only reason you are afraid of spoiling your child’s ‘innocence’ is because you yourself are uncomfortable with the idea, and it makes you all squirmy. Well, get over yourself. Your kid is a person, and will someday be a sexual person, whether you like it or not, so don’t try and hide (‘shield’) it from them – let them learn to love their whole selves.

However, if you have some proof that 9-year-olds looking at their vaginas causes them to become street-walking whores or depressed suicidal maniacs, please let me know.

Ok, well, I hope that made some sense. I’m off to go sit in my internet-less apartment now.

So I was waiting for microbiology class to start this morning when some girl behind me decided to share a story that went something like this:

So my dad’s friend’s girlfriend was a TA for a micro[biology] lab in college and they were doing the thing where you swab your mouth and look at the swab under the slide to see the cheek cells and bacteria and all that. And this one girl got all excited and said, ‘Oh I think I got something, it’s swimming around!’ And the professor came over and was like, ‘That’s not a bacteria, that’s a sperm.’

Forgetting that the story in itself is doubtfully true (sperm are quickly flushed out of the mouth by saliva and broken down by our salivary enzymes (they wouldn’t live more than minutes) – and do you know my professors who would publicly announce such a thing to the class?), the reaction of the class pissed me off.

Of course the story is funny-ha-ha, and the usual ‘Oh my God!’s and ‘Eww!’ and ‘Hahaha, that’s hilarious’ went up. Nothing wrong with that. But then five or six guys started harking on and on about how they would totally tease and name-call anyone that happened to. One of the girls said, ‘But not if you didn’t know them, right? I mean, it’s one thing to tease your friends, but if it was a stranger, you don’t want to, like, make them go commit suicide.’ ‘No way!’ was the general consensus from the guys, ‘If it was someone I didn’t know, I’d tease them more!’

This really irks me, and here’s why: I am sure that these guys have had or currently have girlfriends, and I am sure that they expected, or even demanded, oral sex from their girlfriends (remember, the ‘Christian’ in TCU doesn’t really count). But when a girl actually has some evidence of having given oral sex exposed in a very unfortunate way? Oh man! What a slut! That’s so nasty! Talk about your Madonna* and the Slut dichotomy.

So remember girls, put out like there’s no tomorrow, but make sure there’s never any evidence that you’re anything but the perfect angel. The men-folks, they don’t like that.

* And when I say ‘Madonna’ I, quite obviously, do not mean the pop singer. I mean the virgin mother.

I read this article, which pretty much tries to defend the idea of ‘grey rape,’ when I came across this quote in the comments, that I thought was pretty clever, and thus would share with you all:

Yes means yes,No means no,Whatever we wear,Wherever we go

In a nutshell, there is no such thing as ‘grey rape’. There’s a clear line between rape and non-rape – consent. If consent was not given, it’s rape. If consent was revoked, it’s rape. If consent was given while the person wasn’t legally able to consent (ex: inebriated), it’s rape.

In the article above the author outlines a scenario where a girl dresses provocatively, gets drunk, acts like she wants sex, and then changes her mind at the last minute. The guy “he disregards this as momentary insanity on her part and enters her anyway”. The author claims this is ‘grey rape’ because she “vehemently sen[t] the message that sex was what she wanted” and “even showed up to the party looking like pure sex”. She asks who’s really at fault.

There are a hundred things in this article I could sink my teeth into and tear to pieces, but I feel like it’s been well accomplished by most of the commenters. (Please go read these if you are unconvinced that this is, in fact, rape.)

True, it kind of sucks for the guy – here he was all raring to go, and he gets denied at the last minute. But there’s a really, really easy way to avoid this situation – don’t hook up with girls who are drunk or who seem unsure. Because it doesn’t matter how ready you are or how disappointed you feel – you still need consent all the way through. If you don’t want to be in a situation where you might ignore someone revoking consent – avoid the situation entirely! You have no one to blame but yourself if you get charged with rape because you put yourself in a situation where you knew it might be difficult for you to back down.

It’s hard to listen to ‘no’ when you’re horny as hell – I think lots of people can relate to that. But that’s no excuse. If you think you might not have full control when you’re hot and heavy, avoid getting into that situation with someone who’s unsure or drunk. If you’re really worried, avoid that situation completely except with those you are involved in a relationship with.

Anyway, it gets me all worked up to hear about stuff like that. Be careful out there, everyone.

And let me know if you see a bumper sticker with the above quote on it : )

1 – You do realise that this group proves absolutely nothing related to the initial idea of any two people in the world being connected by 6 people, right? Because the population sample here – it’s kind of skewed – being that we’re all on a fucking social networking site. (And predominantly American, as well)

2 – You do realise that by just ME absolutely refusing to join this group, I am dooming you and the group to fail in your goal of ‘getting everyone on Facebook into one group’. Every person like me dooms you more.

Come on people, use your brains. What exactly did you think this group was going to do???

I laugh in the face of dooming you and your little group. And your little dog Toto, too.

I am Emma. I am a dual-citizen: half British and half American - but I was born in Norway. I love potatoes and purple. I'm shy, but not. I work on computers, bikes, and DNA, and I play violin. Here is the story of a transplant from Texas to Scotland...